Project guest post by the Emissary-ingress project maintainers
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project Emissary-ingress, an open source ingress controller and API gateway for Kubernetes, announces official support by major service mesh communities Linkerd (a graduated CNCF project) and Istio.
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Created by Ambassador Labs, Emissary-ingress is built on Envoy Proxy, a graduated CNCF project, and supports a wide range of use cases for ingress, including load balancing, authentication, and observability. Emissary-ingress version 1.0 was released in January 2020 and has been adopted by thousands of organizations, many of whom are successfully using it in production, including AppDirect, Lifion by ADP, Ticketmaster, Chick-Fil-A, and OneFootball. Customers report successfully using Emissary-ingress in production with requirements as challenging as serving 500,000 requests per second and handling spikes in usage from 5 million users to 15 million in less than 10 minutes.
As organizations adopt Kubernetes and other critical cloud native technologies, interoperability between key open source infrastructure components has become a priority. Developers and operators alike are looking for ways to simplify the complexity of their Kubernetes environments while preserving architectural flexibility. According to the most recent Cloud Native Survey, 27% of organizations use a service mesh in production, a 50% increase over the previous year, and another 42% are evaluating or planning to use one. At the same time, most organizations also have API gateways in place as part of their transition to microservices-based architectures.
With today’s announcement, it will now be easier than ever for organizations to implement Emissary-ingress alongside popular open source service mesh technologies like Linkerd and Istio with confidence.
“Emissary-ingress has matured as a key CNCF project to manage traffic to services running inside Kubernetes clusters. As organizations become more sophisticated and adopt service mesh as part of their cloud native architecture, deeper integration between Emissary-ingress and service mesh technologies like Linkerd and Istio is something our community is now focused on,” said Richard Li, CEO & Founder of Ambassador Labs. “We’re thrilled to have official support from the top service mesh communities to make Emissary-ingress the easiest Kubernetes-native API gateway to use with Linkerd and Istio.”
“As organizations begin their cloud native journeys and adopt Kubernetes, they need solutions for traffic management and observability as they scale,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. “CNCF is now home to many service mesh projects and we’ve seen rapid innovation in the space. We are thrilled to see service mesh communities collaborating across boundaries to advance interoperability with Emissary-ingress, particularly Linkerd and Istio which are two of the most widely adopted tools in the service mesh ecosystem.”
Linkerd is a service mesh that provides critical observability, security, and reliability features to cloud native applications without requiring code changes. The project was created in 2016 by Buoyant and Linkerd joined CNCF in early 2017 as the foundation’s fifth project. It was the first service mesh project and the first CNCF project to adopt the Rust programming language to improve security and performance. Today, organizations like Microsoft, Nordstrom, Expedia, JPMC, Clover Health, Entain, H-E-B, and more rely on Linkerd to power mission-critical production systems.
“As part of our mission is to bring simplicity and user empathy to the service mesh space, we’re excited to help build tighter integrations between Linkerd and key cloud native infrastructure like Emissary-ingress,” said Oliver Gould, creator of Linkerd and CTO of Buoyant. “As the service mesh ecosystem has matured, it has also gained the reputation of being complex and hard to adopt. By partnering with the Emissary-ingress community, we will help deliver the best developer experience possible when it comes to service mesh and API gateway use cases.”
Istio is an open source service mesh project started by teams from Google and IBM, in partnership with the Envoy team at Lyft. Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio’s control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes and Mesos.
“Digital transformation and infrastructure modernization by organizations often results in more complexity, not less,” said Varun Talwar, creator of Istio and co-founder Tetrate. “We look forward to abstracting away this complexity with closer collaboration between the Istio and the Emissary-ingress communities and ultimately unlocking more productivity, reliability, and security for end users as they transition to cloud native architectures.”